The Row Row Row Your Boat Emotion Game is a fun way to talk to kids about emotions and what they sound like. It can be a valuable tool in the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique for See It, Say It and Mimic It. Here’s how it works:

Use a set of emotion cards, an emotion chart or just your own imagination to throw out an emotion to another player.

The player must hum the song Row Row Row your boat sounding like the emotion given.

Laugh and have fun.

It’s that simple! You can use whatever song you want, but we selected Row Row Row Your Boat as a song that virtually everyone knows. A fun game to play if you have a deck of emotion cards (the Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotion cards are coming soon) would be to have the player select the emotion then have the other plays guess the emotion being hummed. You could also have the player pick the song they will be doing and have other player name both the emotion and the song. Break into teams and see how many each team can get in a given amount of time.

Credit to my 10-year-old Nathan who helped me come up with this game over dinner after soccer practice. Here’s a little video we made demonstrating the game. Please forgive the poor sound quality – it’s the best we could get with a phone and sitting at Arby’s!

Fishing for Feelings is a fun game to play with kids to help them learn about emotions. With our template and a few magnets, you can create a game that will help preschool through elementary aged kids to Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up! Fishing for feelings is a great game to help kids start to master the skills included in the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique

Here’s how Fishing for Feelings works.

First download our easy to use template by clicking here or on the picture of the template to the right. Follow the instructions in the template for creating the emotion circles and playing the game.

We bought pre-made reinforced circles at Hobby Lobby and colorful magnets for minimal cost to make the game more aesthetically pleasing, but you can certainly cut your own reinforcing circles and use other magnets if you prefer. (NOTE: the link included for magnets are white as we found the color ones in our local store, but they are not available online)

Helping Your Child Deal With Divorce is a tri-fold pamphlet we’ve designed for parents. If you are a divorced or divorcing parent who is looking for information on how to help your child, this pamphlet is for you. It is also designed for those who work with kids who might be asked by a parent how to help their child.

As explained in the pamphlet,

Divorce hurts. When there are children involved, it hurts even worse for you and for them. This pamphlet is designed to help you to help your child better understand what is going on, grieve the loss they have experienced, heal from the hurt caused by divorce and lay a groundwork to allow them to move forward with their lives and find hope and healing.

The pamphlet covers basic information like how to tell you child, helping your child to grieve, dealing with emotions and helping your child after the divorce. It also includes links, books and other resources that might be helpful. You can access a pdf version of the pamphlet by clicking the photo above or here.

There are nine cards for each of the five components that will help young people to better recognize, understand and talk about their emotions. The pdf file also includes a set of blank cards if you wish to add your own activities to the pile.

How To Play

H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

If you are wondering if your parents’ divorce or separation is your fault, you are not alone. Most children of divorce at some point believe that their parents’ split up had something to do with them. Maybe you think if you had behaved better they would still be together. Perhaps you wonder if you weren’t involved in so many extra-curricular activities if they wouldn’t fight so much and would still be together. Maybe something happened on the day your parents told you about the split, and you’re convinced that what you did that day caused them to split up. Regardless of why you think you caused your parents’ divorce, there is one thing that you need to know for certain:

CHILDREN DO NOT CAUSE DIVORCES, ADULTS DO!

Emotion Color Swatches are a cheap and easy way to teach kids different words for emotions and different degrees of emotions.

Here’s how to make them:

Go to your local hardware store or pain store and get a variety of paint samples that show three or four different intensities of a color on one sheet (we used samples that showed four colors).

On each sample, write words that represent varying degrees of emotions going from least intense (lightest color) to most intense (darkest color).

You can make up your own groupings or use the ones we’ve developed which are shown below (you can access a printable copy of by clicking on the worksheet below). We grouped our emotions as well (e.g., red samples related to emotions in the “anger” category, yellow was “joyous” emotions, blue for emotions related to “sad” as so on).

Once all of our samples were done, we bound them using a metal ring.

Here’s how to use them:

There are a number of ways you can use the Emotions Color Swatches to help teach kids about emotions:

The Elephant Noise Maker is a fun and useful tool for teaching kids deep breathing techniques. Deep breathing is a key coping skill and one of the Soothing Coping Skills covered in Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.

In the past we have drawn a picture of an elephant on a piece of heavy paper or cardboard to create our elephant noise makers. With this new template you can either use the picture to trace on something more durable or simply cut the elephant out and use the template itself.

Here’s are the instructions:

1.Cut out the elephant from the template. Either trace the elephant on to heavy duty paper or cardboard if desired or use the elephant from the template.

Welcome to the second installment in a line of new resources from Hope 4 Hurting Kids called Scenario Cards (I Feel). Last week, we introduced Emotion Scenario Cards (Anger).

These Scenario Cards present scenarios to teens and kids that can be used in a variety of ways in our comprehensive emotions management plan known as Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up! This particular set of cards presents kids with a range of scenarios that might elicit a variety of different emotions. These cards can be used in a variety of ways:

Welcome to the first installment in a line of new resources from Hope 4 Hurting Kids called Emotion Scenario Cards (Anger). These Emotion Scenario Cards present scenarios to teens and kids that can be used in a variety of ways in our comprehensive emotions management plan known as Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up! This particular set of cards presents kids with a range of scenarios that are likely to cause some degree of frustration or anger. These cards can be used in a variety of ways:

Play a game called “Anger in Action.” Have a child select one card and act out two different ways of responding to that situation (or use two kids to act out different scenarios). Encourage them to be dramatic. Then discuss what were the best, worst and funniest reactions. [This accomplishes the Feel It, Mimic It and Talk About It components of The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique.]

There is nothing wrong with being angry. How we choose to deal with that anger is important. If we keep it all bottled up inside, we will suffer in the long run. Or, if we choose inappropriate outlets for our anger, there can be unwanted consequences.

In order to deal with our anger, an important first step is recognizing when we get angry, how angry we get and what we do to express that anger. That’s why we here Hope 4 Hurting Kids have developed:

THE ANGER-OMETER

Like a thermometer that measures temperature, you can use the Anger-ometer to measure the level of your anger and your reactions to it. Use the Anger-ometer for a week to track your anger and look for any patterns. Have a trusted friend or adult look at the results with you. Click on the image below for a printable version of the Anger-ometer today.